In both of your classes, you use a model where the community-engaged learning component
is optional for your students. What are the benefits of structuring your course in that way?

It is beneficial to students in that their schedules are increasingly demanding and more and more
of them are working a lot of hours outside of school, so it makes it difficult for them to carve out
time to do the community engaged component. The option to participate ensures students I’m
sending into the community have made a commitment.

Are their drawbacks to this model?

It is challenging from a pedagogical perspective to create a cohesive class experience if there are
a large number of students who are not taking the community engaged learning path. And it is
also difficult to create a class experience that feels parallel for those two groups of students when
one group is engaged in an experiential learning process that has the capacity to be astonishingly
rich and can really change the way that students relate to the class texts, and the rest of the class
are going through an ordinary academic course.

How has your approach to this model changed over time because of these drawbacks?

Early on, I tried several strategies to manage this discrepancy: I tried having each group of
students meet on a different day of the week, or have the CEL students meet fewer class hours
than non-CEL students to try to balance out their outside of class work. I also shortened the
lengths of assignments for CEL participants to try to even out the workload as they often felt
their workload was heavier due to their time spent out of class. However, these strategies were
leaving non-CEL students envious of their CEL peers. First, because they felt the academic
workload was inequitable and second, because they were missing out on the richness of their
peers’ experiences off campus and how deeply it was connecting them to the course material.
Often, non-CEL students regretted making the decision not to participate for the semester.

What works for you now?

More recently, the way I square this is to have everyone in the Literature and Public Life course
complete a “Public Work” project. The options for students are to complete the CEL component
or they can complete an Individual Action Project that requires the same number of hours as the
CEL component. This has the effect of making it feel as if everyone is engaged in something
experiential and also results in most people choosing CEL because it is so much simpler to walk
into a community organization that already has a focused, purposeful mission and a role for
students to fill rather than students having to design their own projects and articulate for
themselves the goals and values of the project. It has also resulted in the students being more
interested in each other’s work.

And you also use this model in Nature Stories, correct? How does it work in that course?

It works extremely well, probably better than the Literature and Public Life Course, because of
the close fit I can get between the Community-Engaged work and the course material. It’s a
3000-level course and the students are a little more experienced and generally a little bit better
equipped to articulate a project for themselves. They tend to come with a clearer idea of what
their passion in this area is and what they might shape their project around. I still end up with a
lot more CELs in the class because when the representatives from the environmental
organizations come to my class their presentations are powerful. They are able to present an
appealing case and students get very interested in seeing what their work looks like.

In this class, I am also able to get the students to a higher level reflectively in terms of self-
critique and in terms of problem solving or thinking about solutions to problems, despite the fact
that the problems are so large. The individual and collective experience of seeing everyone
engaging at sites that are tackling these issues from different angles shows them there is a lot of
potential for change. They begin to identify in more concrete ways how they think that change
can proceed, so they begin to craft a more sophisticated narrative about what nature means to
human cultures and how human culture can work more actively with natural processes.

Speaking of reflection, what is your favorite reflection activity?

I ask my students to create a short dialogue between someone they have gotten to know through
their community site and one of the authors we are reading. They can place themselves in the
dialogue if they want. At times there’s a real struggle as they try to reconcile the different
perspectives. Sometimes there’s a leap in their recognition of a connection between reading as an
academic chore and their community work, which is typically a more natural and social
experience for them. It helps students to create the link between academic and theoretical works
with the real, lived experiences of people who are in their communities; it’s an eye-opening
moment for them.

What’s your advice for someone who is new to teaching a CEL course?

To be sure to make room within class time for students to share their experiences. There’s a huge
part of their learning that is experiential and you will not have access to unless you create a space
where you can engage them conversationally.

Any last comments for your colleagues to consider?

Go experiential. Engage if you can with the community sites themselves and do it in a way that
honors their time. The first time I taught my own course that had a community-engaged learning
component, I went and volunteered at one of the sites where the students would be for the
semester. If you don’t have time for a sustained volunteer commitment in your schedule, another
way to learn more about an organization is to do a site visit or to set up a brief conversation with
the site supervisor. It can enrich how you draw out students’ experiences when they are back in
the classroom and can help you understand how the individuals at the community organizations
perceive their work.